Chapter 8Global Stratification

An Overview

• Global stratification: Patterns of social inequality in the world as a whole.

• The richest 20% of the U.S population earns about 40% of the national income.

• The richest 20% of the global population receives about 80% of world income.

• The poorest 5th of the world’s people struggle to survive on 1% of global income.

Percentage of Global Income

Global Stratification:An Overview

• High Income Countries

– Countries with the most developed economies cover 25% percent of the earth’s land.

– High income countries control the world’s financial markets.

• Middle Income Countries

• Have per capita income ranging between $2500 and $10,000.

• Low Income Countries– Largely agrarian with some

industry.

Distribution of World Income

The Relative Share of Income and Population by Level of Economic Development

Median Age at Death in Global Perspective

Global Wealth and Poverty

• In much of the world, most of the population gets by on several hundred dollars a year.

Poverty in poor countries is more severe than in rich countries.

• Economic productivity is lowest where population growth is highest.

Global Wealth and Poverty

• Death comes early in poor societies.

• Families in poor societies depend on women’s income.– They often work in sweat shops.– They have little access to birth control.

As many as 400 million people live in conditions that amount to slavery.

Anti-Slavery International

• Debt Bondage: Employers hold workers captive by not paying them enough wages to meet their debts.

• Servile forms of marriage: Families marry off women against their will.

• Human trafficking: The movement of men, women, and children from one place to another to perform forced labor.

“Next to trading in drugs and guns, trading in people brings the greatest profits to organized crime around the world” (Macionis, 2007 p. 254).

Global Stratification:Theoretical Analysis

• Modernization Theory: explains global inequality in terms of technological and cultural differences between societies.

• As recent as several centuries ago, the entire world was poor.

• Because poverty was the norm, affluence is the key to

• understanding poverty.

Rostow’s Four Stages of Modernization

Stage 1: Traditional stage.

Stage 2: Take-off stage.

Stage 3: Drive to technological maturity.

Stage 4: High mass consumption.

• High income countries play important roles in global development:

– Helping control population.

– Increasing food production.

– Increasing technology.

– Providing aid.

Dependency Theory

• Dependency theory: Explains global inequality in terms of the historical exploitation of poor societies by rich ones.

• Rich countries have impoverished low income ones.

• The destructive process extends back for centuries.

Wallerstein’s Capitalists World Economy

• Immanuel Wallerstein: explains global stratification using a model of the “capitalists world economy.”

• Wallerstein called the rich nations the core of the world economy.

• The low-income countries are the Periphery of the world economy.

• The remaining countries are the semiperiphery of the world economy.

• “According to Wallerstein, the world economy benefits rich societies (by generating profits) and harms the rest of the world (by causing poverty).

Global Stratification: Looking Ahead

• Among the most important trends in recent decades is the development of a global economy.

The concentration of wealth in high-income countries coupled with poverty of low-income nations may be the largest problem facing humanity.

Prosperity and Stagnation in Global Perspective